The Scar Boys (10 page)

So why after a decade of invisibility had I suddenly materialized in front of Mary Beth Tice, as if out of thin air? Simple. If you’re in a touring rock band, especially if you’re still in high school, you are per se cool.

Unless, of course, you’re the king of uncool.

Mary Beth was leaning against the locker adjacent to mine when she broke our ten-year vow of silence. At first, I presumed she was talking to someone else. It was the natural thing to think. Just like a fish had no reason to believe that the man on the boat was talking to it, I had no reason to believe Mary Beth was talking to me. Men didn’t talk to fishes, and Mary Beth Tices didn’t talk to Harbinger Joneses. It’s not that I hadn’t heard her, it’s that I hadn’t heard her talking
to me
.

I closed my locker, spun the dial, and turned to walk to class. The “
Hi Harry. I heard your band is going on the road. That is so cool!”
was still hanging in the air. It was static to me, white noise in the background. But there was Mary Beth
Tice blocking my way. Remembering the last time this’d happened—the day she’d said, “Excuse me, please” and I’d frozen—I acted quickly. I smiled and stepped to the side.

Then three things happened:

“Oh!” I said, with a little too much volume. “You were talking to me.”

“Unless you know someone else who plays in a band that’s going on tour?” she said in a teasing, and if I think about it now, flirtatious voice.

“Just Johnny and Richie,” I answered, regretting my stupidity before the words were fully out of my mouth.

To her credit, Mary Beth smiled. I was dumbfounded. Mary Beth Tice didn’t talk to me, and she definitely didn’t smile at me. Something was amiss in the universe, and I stood there sullen and silent, trying to figure it out. Eventually, Mary Beth gave up. She got bored of waiting for me to make conversation, shrugged her shoulders, and walked away.

“Thanks,” I managed to mutter when she was out of earshot. That’s when I felt an elbow in my back and my face was slammed into the locker. It was Billy the Behemoth.

“Don’t talk to yourself, freak. People will think you’re crazy.” He kept walking, his friends laughing out loud and high-fiving one another.

I may have been in a band, even a touring band, but I still occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder. It would take a lot more than a handful of gigs at a few out-of-town nightclubs to change that.

So let’s move on. No wait. Before we do, let’s take a step back. It’s important to the story. Trust me, you’ll see.

When I was a kid—before there was ever a Johnny McKenna or a Cheyenne Belle or a Ford Econoline van—my mother, father, and I would spend one week each summer on a spit of sand just off the New Jersey coast called Long Beach Island. I would sit on that beach for hours, a hooded sweatshirt hiding my face from the other kids, and watch wave after wave build and break. The thundering sound of the surf, rather than upsetting me the way real thunder did and does, soothed me, made me believe I wasn’t afraid of anything.

During these vacations—and always at my insistence—we’d pay a visit to the century-old Barnegat Lighthouse at the northern tip of the island. I was obsessed with that lighthouse. I knew everything about “Old Barney,” from the date he was built to the date he was decommissioned. I’d
look up at his red and white tower and admire his strength and solitude. I’d wish that I could be a lighthouse, too.

Leaden clouds blanketed the sky from horizon to horizon as we stepped out of the car on one particular afternoon in 1979. I was craning my neck to stare at the top when something wet and cold nudged the back of my leg, startling me to the point of almost falling over. I turned around to find a beagle-lab-something-or-other mutt looking up at me, tail wagging, eyes full of expectation. I bent down to pet him and he licked my hand. The little guy didn’t have a collar. I scanned the parking lot but didn’t see anyone who looked like they were missing a dog.

“Mom?” My mother turned and saw the two of us standing there, probably both looking lost. If I’d had a tail I suppose it would have been wagging, too.

“Oh, isn’t he precious. Ben, come over here.”

To understand what happens next, you have to know two things about my father:

First, he’d grown to resent me. From the moment my mom found my flaming body dangling from that dogwood tree, my dad had become the odd man out in our house. Everything in my mother’s world revolved around me. She had no attention and no patience left for her husband. My dad dealt with it for a while, but eventually he got fed up. I would overhear my parents late at night, my father complaining that their life had come to a complete standstill,
that they were starting to lose their friends, that it wasn’t healthy for them or for me. My mother, sounding shocked, would only say “But Ben … Harry!” A few months later the bickering turned to arguing, their voices reaching a decibel level that even a pillow held smushed over my head couldn’t keep out. After that they gave up all pretense and fought out in the open. If you’re from a happy home, you just can’t know how much this sort of thing sucks.

It didn’t help that my father was out of work at the time. A local news station had videotaped my dad’s latest political patron, a New York City councilman, coming out of a drag bar. He—the councilman, not my dad—was wearing a frilly green dress, matching shoes, and pearls. The photo beneath the
Daily News
headline, which read “Council Woe-Man,” showed my dad’s boss in the full getup, but without his wig. The story mushroomed into a citywide scandal, which, like all scandals, blew over as soon as the newspaper-reading mob moved onto the next big thing. But the damage was done. The councilman was forced to resign, and my dad was left to putter around the house and get in my mom’s way.

There’s an apocryphal story about my dad wanting to wash his boxer shorts in their new top-loading Maytag dishwasher, the first either of them had ever owned. “Ruth, if it cleans the glasses, it will clean the clothes.” My mom gave him a choice: find a job, or else. He didn’t know what “or else” was, and he didn’t wait around to find out.

My dad took a job working as a legislative liaison in the governor’s office in Albany, three hours away. We’d see him on weekends, at Christmas, during summer vacation, and most other times the legislature was out of session. He’d barrel into the house like a freight train, showing up with souvenirs from around the state: A refrigerator magnet from Skaneateles Lake, a “Relax at the Spa” button from Saratoga, a T-shirt with a picture of the
Maid of the Mist
in the foreground and a rainbow and Niagara Falls in the background.

The long-distance living arrangement seemed to solve the problem for my mother, but it never suited my dad, or maybe it never suited his idea of what his life should be like. My father imagined himself the king of his castle, a benevolent, enlightened man, presiding over life at his own Kennedy compound. Instead, he was an exile, granted visitation only when the government allowed, and he blamed it all on me. It was a feeling that had been gnawing at him and it needed an outlet.

The second thing to understand about my dad is that he really hates dogs.

My father was just about to go into the lighthouse when he heard my mother call. He walked over to where we were standing.

“I think he’s lost,” I said, motioning to the dog.

“Nonsense. He’s with one of these families. Someone is up in the lighthouse and they just left him to wait.”

“I don’t know, Ben,” my mother said, studying the dog.

My father muttered “For crying out loud” to himself, and, always desperate to prove his point, stomped off, systematically approaching the few other families in and around the lighthouse while my mother and I waited. Five minutes later he came back with his brow furrowed.

“One of the men inside saw a green station wagon pull up, let the dog out, and drive away. They think maybe he was abandoned here.”

“Oh, how awful.” My mother looked at my father with pursed lips, motioning at me with her eyes. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“What exactly are we supposed to do?” my father asked, his words clipped.

“Can we keep him?” I knew the answer before it was spoken.

“Absolutely not.”

“We can at least bring him to a shelter, dear.”

My father weighed his options, knowing that if he did nothing he’d spend the rest of his vacation with a sullen, angry wife and a disappointed son. He grudgingly agreed. “Okay, a shelter.”

Dad got down on his hands and knees a few feet from the dog and whistled, trying, I supposed, to mimic something he’d seen in a movie or on TV. “C’mere boy, over here.” The dog, who in my head I’d given the clever name of “Blacky,” wasn’t buying it. He inched back.

My father inched forward.

Blacky inched back.

My dad stood up and looked around, pretending to ignore the dog, thinking he could outsmart him. The dog never took his eyes off my father, so when Dad lunged forward to grab him, Blacky bolted.

In the instant the dog turned and ran, I heard a sickening scrape of bone on bone and I saw my father grab his back and fall to the ground. The pain must have been intense, because tears were streaming down his lobster-colored cheeks, and his breath was short and raspy. I held out my hand to help him up, but he batted it away.

“This is your fault, everything is your fault! Just get away from me you god damn freak!”

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There was no wind, no sound of the ocean, no sunlight. Just the reverberating echo of the word “freak” as it ricocheted off the lighthouse and the rocks in the flat, gray stillness.

“Ben!” my mother barked and time started moving forward again.

My father mumbled something, I didn’t know what, and took my hand, which was still extended in his direction. I didn’t even think about my reaction. I pulled his arm as hard as I could, jerking his torso and head toward my foot, which was moving in the direction of his face at the speed of sound. When my Converse sneaker connected with his mouth, I felt something crack. Three bloodstained teeth flew through the air and landed on his chest. I dropped knee-first onto his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. His arm was still in my grasp when I landed, and I could feel his shoulder separate.

Strike that. I couldn’t feel his shoulder separate or anything else, because, no matter how much I might’ve wanted to, that’s not what I did.

Here’s what really happened:

My father mumbled something, I didn’t know what, and took my hand, which was still extended in his direction. I helped him up. He didn’t look me in the eye, and he
didn’t say anything else. I was so used to dealing with crap like this at school that I knew how to control and bottle up my emotions. I just pretended like it’d never happened. I didn’t even let myself cry.

I opened the car door for the old man, preparing to ease him into the backseat, when, without warning, the dog came bounding across the pavement and leapt in ahead of us, his tail wagging so fast it was just a black blur. My father hurled some insult at Blacky, and I did my best not to laugh.

After we dropped the dog at the local shelter, my dad spent the rest of the vacation lying prone on the floor of our bungalow. It was the beginning of a lifelong battle with back spasms, his vertebrae shifting without warning into configurations so painful as to require a cane for support.

He did apologize that night, looking up at me from the floor. A well-worn carpet surrounded him, making it look like he was floating in a beige-colored sea. He told me that sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, people say and do things they don’t mean to say or do.

“Pain and stress can hijack a man’s soul and twist it out of shape, like my back,” he said, trying to smile.

I nodded, but it didn’t matter, the damage was done. I didn’t believe his excuse anyway. My sorry little life had already taught me that things said under duress are always more true than not. But there was at least one unintended consequence from that vacation. I had the moral high ground and a “Get Out of Jail Free” card with my father.

It was a Friday afternoon. My dad was home from Albany for the weekend and we were sitting across the kitchen table from one another. I was leaving on tour in a matter of weeks, and I hadn’t told my parents anything about it. In fact, regarding my future, I had told them a series of colossal lies.

Colossal Lie #1:
I had applied to four colleges. They’d helped me fill out the applications, write my essays, and even took me to see all four schools. When everything was ready to be mailed, I drove my mom’s car to the post office—“Mom, Dad, this will mean more to me if I’m the one to mail the applications”—and pitched all four packages in a Dumpster.